Instagram Updates API To Allow Direct Video Scheduling

Instagram has updated its API to allow direct video scheduling that allows third-party services to build the feature into their apps.

The ability to schedule anything on Instagram has been a real struggle, and until now you’d have to rely on a third-party service that offers the feature. However, you still couldn’t schedule anything directly, and you certainly couldn’t schedule videos. By “directly” I mean you’d still have to receive a notification on your mobile app to post. Direct scheduling for images eventually appeared, and scheduling services promptly added it.

Now, if you want to schedule a video directly, you can – you just have to find a scheduling service that supports it first. That’s because like direct scheduling for images, the API is only open and available to Instagram Marketing Partners via the Content Publishing API beta program. Apps like Buffer or Hootsuite are part of that crowd, so I’d be expecting them to add the feature soon.

The caveat? Well, just like direct photo scheduling, direct video scheduling only works for Instagram Business Profiles, so you can’t schedule directly on a personal account. But that’s ok I guess. Surely, anyone using Instagram professionally would have switched to a Business Profile already.

This feature is bound to make many power users happy, but we want more! What about direct multi-image scheduling? When’s that coming?